Maxthon Blog

I’ve often compared Firefox and Maxthon as being a PT-boat and a battleship. When you first install Firefox, it has barely the tools you need simply to browse from one site to another.  You can tap into a decent supply of plug-ins to increase Firefox’s capacities, but when you first install Maxzthon, it display enough armaments to sieze the Web and transform it into a force  exceedingly more useful than an Internet you simply surf.

Maybe Maxthon’s developers were getting so embarassed by the browser’s wealth of features, that that’s why they’re hidden some of them in the latest version, 2.1.  One translates text from a dozen other langauges into English. Another links to “useful tools” to learn more about the page you’re on currently, such as an archived version, its domain information, or pages Google considers similar  to the page  you’re on.  They’re both hidden in the same spot.

To uncover these features, you first need to right click on any of the toolbars, and then select “Customize …”  from the drop-down menu that appears.  Now position the pointer just to the right of the Address Bar–actually, just to the right of the arrow icon at the end of the Address Bar where there is a small triangle pointing downward. Click on it and a box with the words “[Address Tools]” appears. Click on that box and drag it to one of the main menus in Maxthon.   To me the”Tools” menu seems appropriate but it can be wherever makes sense to  you.  End the customizing session by clicking  “Close”  on the Optimize box that lists all the buttons you can  insert into Maxthon’s interface.

Now when you go to wherever you put “Address Tools” you’ll find that its been replaced by a two-item menu with the choices “Translations …” and “Useful Tools ….”

I have long ago given up trying to figure out why software developers do things they way they do, such as put features in places no one is ever likely to find them. These aren’t the only hidden treasures in Maxthon. We uncover some more within the next week or so.

Don’t just surf the Web. Seize it!

Wakoopa–the combination software and Web site–is one of those things that ever so often you encountner in computing and on the Internet that has absolutely no practical value, might even be a drag on your resources, and yet brings with it a fascination that’s hard to ignore.Load a little Wakoopa client on your computer and after you’ve done a few days work, you too can have a display that looks like this.

It shows the software I’ve been using yesterday or over the course of several months.  (Why, look!  There’s Maxthon right at the top. Imagine that!)  I’m not sure exactliy why I would need this information, but it’s interesting the first two or three times you check it out.  When that starts to bore you, you can go to wakoopa.com and spy on people who want the world to know what software they use.  (Is it just me, or is computing becoming more and more narsacistic? Is it narsacistic of me to wonder if something’s just me?)

If no one you’d like to spy on is Wakooping,  you can look at Wakoopa’s sofware use statistics compiled from all their users who are willing to share. This could be a saving grace for Wakoopa.  I can imagine it’s possible to stumble across some program you’d never heard of that was gaining popularity among others.  But don’t consider it a  scientific or statistically valid survey of software populaity. Tell Wakoopa to zero in on browsers, for example, and you find Firefox as the most used browser.  We know this is lame for a couple of reason.  One is that even Firefox doesn’t claim to have more users than Internet Explorer, which Wakoopas to second place. And you can see why:  Wakoopa’s  user sample is only about 30,000   peoople, and they would tend to be self-selected from among techy ukses who actually care about this sort of this, and who are the type more likely to use Firefox than they would IE.

All science aside, as they say in some political circles,  Wakoopa is  fun for getting through a few minutes of boredom. Better get bored real quick. I don’t think Wakoopa has a long future.

Today, April 30, marks the 15th anniversary of a momentous decision that meant the Internet was free and open to all. Without that choice by the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history.  If they had, all of us today might be using something called Gopher. And paying for the privledge. John Murrel tells the whole story at siliconvalley.com.

If you didn’t get voting for Maxthon completely out of your system with the Webware 100 Awards, surf on over to Cafe Medico, where a member is conducting one of those unscientific polls to find out what other members at the cafe use for browsing.  (You must register first; it’s painless.)

When Maxthon was selected as one of the Webware 100  winners,  Webware editor Rafe Needleman wrote up Maxthon in the description of all the award winners.  There was one problem with the write up.  It gives a false impression of the circumstances surrounding the votes Maxthon received in the browser categoryRafe writes:

“Of the ten categories, the most popular in terms of votes cast was Browsing. However it’s worth noting that one of the entries in that category, Maxthon, drove an inordinate amount of votes by putting a vote-driving popup in the software itself.”

The problem is that word “inordinate.” It suggests that Maxthon didn’t deserve all the votes it received. To set the record straight, here are  the events  that led up to Maxthon garnering more than 400,000 votes, about a  fourth of all the votes cast in the Webware contest among all 100 winning products.

When Maxthon was chosen as a finalist for the award, Needleman wrote us, “Starting on February 25, you can encourage your users and fans to vote for your product ….” There was no qualification on how we could encourage users to vote; we could have hired the Goodyear blimp or bought advertising time on American Idol.   We chose to put links to the voting site on a few of Maxthon’s pages and on a pop-up we sometimes use for  such things as news and wishing users a Merry Christmas.

The hitch in the process occurred when David Lenehan, the CEO of PollDaddy, the company tallying the votes,  walked into his server room  to be greeted by flashing lights and screaming alarms.  The Maxthon  votes, coming in at a rate as high as  100 votes for ever y .01 seconds, had brought down his servers.

Lenehan, in Ireland,  got in touch with  Maxthon CEO Jeff Chen in Beijing through  Skype chat.  After hearing  Chen’s explanation of how Maxthon was promoting itself for the contest, Lenehan said, “There is nothing wrong with what you did. … There is nothing wrong with your votes.

“Going by the vote count I don’t think you guys actually need any more votes,” he added.

Chen agreed  to the solution Lenehan proposed: taking the contest link off  the news pop-up.  

“Although we want more users to know, I also don’t want to take trouble to your system,” Chen said.

After the pop-up was deactivated, votes for Maxthon continued to pour in. After the contest, Needleman wrote Chen, “ I do owe you a big thanks: 6% of the Maxthon voters also cast votes for other Webware 100 finalists, and we really do appreciate the traffic and the visibility.“

What it comes down to is that Maxthon is a damn good browser, its  users reflect that fact with their enthusiastic support, and a vote is a vote is a vote.  Anyone who has doubts that Maxthon deserves to be in the Top Ten of all vote getters for the Webware 100 Awards only has to download a copy at http://maxthon.com/download.htm to find out for themselves.